Obama opens new oil drilling offshore (March 31, 2010)

US bans new drilling in Gulf of Mexico (April 30, 2010)

(Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, April 12, 2010)
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[Andrew Bacevich served 23 years, some of them in Vietnam, before retiring from the Army. He's now professor of history and international relations at Boston University.] . . . BILL MOYERS: Given what’s happening in the killing of these innocent people, is the very term, “military victory in Afghanistan,” an oxymoron? . . . ANDREW BACEVICH: Oh, this is–yes. And I think one of the most interesting and indeed perplexing things that’s happened in the past three, four years is that in many respects, the officer corps itself has given up on the idea of military victory. We could find any number of quotations from General Petraeus, the central command commander, and General McChrystal, the immediate commander in Afghanistan, in which they say that there is no military solution in Afghanistan, that we will not win a military victory, that the only solution to be gained, if there is one, is through bringing to success this project of armed nation-building. . . . And the reason that’s interesting, at least to a military historian of my generation, of the Vietnam generation, is that after Vietnam, this humiliation that we had experienced, the collective purpose of the officer corps, in a sense, was to demonstrate that war worked. To demonstrate that war could be purposeful. . . . That out of that collision, on the battlefield, would come decision, would come victory. And that soldiers could claim purposefulness for their profession by saying to both the political leadership and to the American people, “This is what we can do. We can, in certain situations, solve very difficult problems by giving you military victory.” . . . Well, here in the year 2010, nobody in the officer corps believes in military victory. And in that sense, the officer corps has, I think, unwittingly really forfeited its claim to providing a unique and important service to American society. I mean, why, if indeed the purpose of the exercise in Afghanistan is to, I mean, to put it crudely, drag this country into the modern world, why put a four-star general in charge of that? Why not—why not put a successful mayor of a big city? Why not put a legion of social reformers? Because the war in Afghanistan is not a war as the American military traditionally conceives of war.

(June Chua, rabble.ca, April 23, 2010)
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The 86-minute film chronicles the relentless efforts of American lawyers trying to take the soft drink giant to court over the killings of 10 union leaders, who represented workers at Coke bottling plants in Colombia.

The documentary splits its time nicely between two battles: the court fight waged by Daniel Kovalik, lawyer for the United Steelworkers union, on behalf of Columbian union members, and the public awareness crusade of Ray Rogers, who directed the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke.

(Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com, April 22, 2010)
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But the ultimate accomplishment of the already rich, the newly rich and the corporate rich, has been their global solidarity on the corporate/financial front. It’s been a long run up to globalism, but the rich have great patience. As an American, all my life I’ve heard their chief mouthpiece, the president of the United States, beginning with Eisenhower, right on up through Kennedy, Reagan, Ford, Carter and Bush, and now Obama, sing the same song. Which goes moreover like this: ”Trade is the road to peace. Commerce and business know no national boundaries. They link nations together on productivity, creating jobs and peace across the world.” . . . It sounded good at the time. Who would have thought that the people enjoying all this harmony and peace brought about through globalization would be enjoying it in a one big happy planetary work gulag? And if they are not doing so at the moment, they will be as soon global capitalism, under the watchful solidarity of the rich, bears full fruit. . . . Thanks to globalization, the American, Australian and European working classes are on their way to extinction, in terms of their traditional rights, and quality of life. Just like the workers being poisoned to death by circuit board toxins in Guiyu, China, their fates will be determined by global capital, either by default or by bitter struggle against it. We are not seeing much of the latter and are not likely to, until it is too late, which it may already be. After all, you cannot put up much of a struggle against global capital when you worship it a creed and are addicted to commodities too. . . . There is no way the world’s working people can win in the long run, which is getting pretty damned short, or even survive, except by joining the worker struggles, of China, Asia and Africa and India. The idea that American workers are the same as the Asian and Latin American and African working people goes down hard in American gullets. . . . But for Americans, it does not go down at all. As a people, they’ll never ever accept that fact, because they’ll never know it for at least two reasons. (1) They are  too over worked and undereducated to find out for themselves, and (2) American corporate media machinery will never let them hear of it. . . . And for that I blame Anderson Cooper.

[Click the credit line above for some brilliant reasoning as to why Cooper is to blame.]

(Noah Shachtman, Wired.com, April 23, 2010)
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The Obama administration is poised to take up one of the more dangerous and hare-brained schemes of the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon. The New York Times is reporting that the Defense Department is once again looking to equip intercontinental ballistic missiles with conventional warheads. The missiles could then, in theory, destroy fleeing targets a half a world away — a no-notice “bolt from the blue,” striking in a matter of hours. There’s just one teeny-tiny problem: the launches could very well start World War III. . . . those anti-terror missiles look and fly exactly like the nuclear missiles we’d launch at Russia or China, in the event of Armageddon. “For many minutes during their flight patterns, these missiles might appear to be headed towards targets in these nations,” a congressional study notes. That could have world-changing consequences. “The launch of such a missile,” then-Russian president Vladimir Putin said in a state of the nation address after the announcement of the Bush-era plan, “could provoke a full-scale counterattack using strategic nuclear forces.”

(Jeremy Scahill, The Nation, April 16, 2010,)
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Several Democrats refused, through spokespeople, to comment on the assassination plan when contacted by The Nation, including Senator Russ Feingold and Representative Jan Schakowsky, both of whom serve on the Intelligence Committees. . . . One of the few Democrats to publicly address the issue of government-sanctioned assassinations is Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich. “I don’t support it — period,” he said in an interview. “I think people in both parties that are concerned about the Constitution should be speaking out on this. I can’t account for what anyone else doesn’t do.” . . . Kucinich told The Nation he has sent several letters to the Obama administration raising questions about the potential unconstitutionality of the policy, as well as possible violations of international law, but has received no response. “With all the smart people that are in that administration, they’ve got to know the risks that they’re taking here with violations of law,” he says. . . . Targeted killings are not a new Obama administration policy. [COMMENT by Lorenzo: Like Bush the Younger, Mr. Obama seems to have a blood lust of some sort. Perhaps it comes from never having actually been in a war himself.] Beginning three days after his swearing in, President Obama has authorized scores of lethal drone strikes, including against specific individuals, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, surpassing the Bush era numbers. . . . In January, Dana Priest reported in the Washington Post that the CIA had U.S. citizens on an assassination list, but the Post later ran a correction stating that only JSOC had “a target list that includes several Americans.” . . . [Kucinich] added: “The assassination policies vitiate the presumption of innocence and the government then becomes the investigator, policeman, prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner all in one. That raises the greatest questions with respect to our constitution and our democratic way of life.” . . . Kucinich says the case of al-Awlaki is an attempt to make “a short-cut around the Constitution,” saying, “Short-cuts often belie the deep and underlying questions around which nations rise and fall. We are really putting our nation in jeopardy by pursuing this kind of policy.”

(Liliana Segura, AlterNet, April 21, 2010)
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African Americans and Latinos make up 70 percent of the incarcerated population . . . Now, two criminologists have concluded, in a new study investigating public attitudes behind harsh sentencing, that the warehousing of African Americans and other minorities is no accident. Rather, “racial resentments are inextricably entwined in public punitiveness.” In other words, racism and the rise of “tough on crime” policies go hand in hand. . . . they write, “it is somewhat disconcerting that theories of the mass-incarceration movement do not place race and racism at the center of their explanation for why the United States imprisons so many of its citizens.” . . . This conclusion echoes the work of civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander, who, in the introduction to her new book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, admits that even she was once skeptical of how central racism was to the rise of the modern American prison system. “Quite belatedly, I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.” . . . Alexander argues that the U.S. prison system has so sweepingly and consistently targeted African American men that it has effectively created a new racial caste system. . . . For those who study up close — or who have experienced from the inside — the excesses of U.S. prison system, the conclusions of this study will come as no surprise. But the authors’ conclusion that criminal justice experts ought to “place race and racism at the center of their explanation for why the United States imprisons so many of its citizens” is crucially important, particularly at a moment when the Obama administration itself is increasing federal funding for policies that embrace some of the same policies that led to the current prison crisis. . . . ”[W]hen politicians justify their support for getting tough on criminals by citing public-opinion polls,” Unnever and Cullen warn, “they are either explicitly or implicitly basing their policy decisions on racialized punitive attitudes. In short, the data show that when it comes to public opinion about crime and its control, race and racism matter.”

(William Astore, Tomdispatch.com, April 20, 2010)
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Kleptocracy — now, there’s a word I was taught to associate with corrupt and exploitative governments that steal ruthlessly and relentlessly from the people. . . . If we were to take an honest look at America’s blasted landscape of “losers” and the far shinier, spiffier world of “winners,” we’d have to admit that it wasn’t signs of onrushing socialism or fascism that stood out, but of staggeringly self-aggrandizing greed and theft right in the here and now . . . We’d see, in a word, kleptocracy on a scale to dazzle. . . . Think of socialism and fascism as the red herrings of this moment  . . . if this is socialism, why are private health insurers the government’s go-to guys for healthcare coverage?  If this is fascism, why haven’t the secret police rounded up tea partiers and progressive critics as well and sent them to the lager or thegulag? . . . What drives America today is, in fact, business — just as was true in the days of Calvin Coolidge.  But it’s not the fair-minded “free enterprise” system touted in those freshly revised Texas guidelines for American history textbooks; rather, it’s a rigged system of crony capitalism that increasingly ends in what, if we were looking at some other country, we would recognize as an unabashed kleptocracy. . . . Recall, if you care to, those pallets stacked with hundreds of millions of dollars that the Bush administration sent to Iraq and which, Houdini-like, simply disappeared. Think of the ever-rising cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, now in excess of a trillion dollars, and just whose pockets are full, thanks to them. . . . If you want to know the true state of our government and where it’s heading, follow the money (if you can) and remain vigilant . . . A spirit of shared sacrifice, dismissed as hopelessly naïve, has been replaced by a form of tribalized privatization in which insiders find ways to profit no matter what.

I hope that one day my grandchildren do something like this!

(Richard Dawkins, April 12, 2010)
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[The answer according to Dawkins is:]
No. As the College of Cardinals must have recognized when they elected him, he is perfectly – ideally – qualified to lead the Roman Catholic Church. A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds; a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part; a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence: in short, exactly the right man for the job. He should not resign, moreover, because he is perfectly positioned to accelerate the downfall of the evil, corrupt organization whose character he fits like a glove, and of which he is the absolute and historically appropriate monarch.  … No, Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice – the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution – while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears.

… So, Richard, tell us how you really feel …